Friday, March 26, 2010

THE SKY FACTORY

Ambient SkyCeiling in the gym at The Recovery Project, Livonia, MI.
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Based in Fairfield, Iowa, The Sky Factory, LC was conceived by Bill Witherspoon—a businessman who is also an artist - or an artist who is also a businessman. The merger of art and technology in the Sky Factory products is stunning and they’re described as “authentic illusions of nature for interior spaces.” Their line includes SkyCeilings, (illusory skylights) and luminous virtual windows, some of which incorporate the use of high-definition digital cinema footage. Many of these products have been installed in medical environments such as hospitals and clinics while others are in workspaces, hotels, and private residences. The response to the nature-based imagery has been positive. For example, the SkyCeilings modify the viewers’ perception of vertical space, making enclosed areas feel more open and less claustrophobic, a quality that’s very valuable, especially where patients are having medical procedures performed such as CT scans and MRI’s. I had the chance to interview Bill Witherspoon and I learned a great deal more about The Sky Factory and about Bill himself.
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Sky Factory Luminous SkyCeiling installed inside the Kirby residence, Houston, Tx..

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PAINTER’S BREAD: What strikes me about both the ceilings and the windows that The Sky Factory makes is the ethic in the product because no image used has struck me as beyond nature, there’s no use of fantasy, there’s this down to earth aspect of the use of the images. I think with this type of product there can always be a misuse of imagery or a use that would be less honorable for the purpose intended—can you speak to that issue?
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BILL WITHERSPOON: Yes, and I hope you’re right. It is our intention to record the events of nature whether we’re doing it with still photography or with digital cinema, it’s the same principle. We want to record the events of nature with as much honesty as possible. Now, what do we mean by an event of nature, some clouds form, drift and dissolve, that’s an event of nature, blossoms and leaves come out in the Spring and move in the breeze, leaves change colors in the Fall and drop off, trees get covered in snow and ice - all these are simple events of nature. In terms of the actual practice it’s not really possible to photograph all of the vegetation that we photograph and to do it at the right season, the right time of day and when there is also interesting and appropriate cloud activity. What do you do if you have a three-day window for pear blossoms, and you have high winds and grey skies the entire time? You have to wait for another year. On the other hand, if the air is still, and the sky is clear you can shoot and then use Photoshop to drop out the sky and combine the vegetative files with those of an appropriate sky. But, when you do the layering there are big challenges to keep it honest and those challenges lies in composition, in the matching of light for direction, time of day and season. Further, when we design a SkyCeiling image for an interior space we have to know the size of the opening of the installation and the height of the ceiling to make the perspective correct. Imagine a 4’ x 4’ opening in an eight-foot ceiling, you see much more of any trees and the sky than if the same opening is in a twelve-foot ceiling. So we have to take into consideration the height and size of the SkyCeiling when we compose – otherwise we’d end up with an unnatural look and feel. Always what we are after is a record of the events of nature and it’s not about our individual artistic expression, I don’t think anybody’s particularly concerned with that at The Sky Factory - it’s enough of a challenge to create an illusion that really works. Our concerns are not a lot different than those of artists in many periods of art history; trying to experience, understand and then record what light is really doing, what’s really happening in space and how the eye and mind are being moved.


eScape™ digital cinema virtual window in testing phase at The Sky Factory.

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PB: I see a difference in what goes on with an artist in the making of the art versus when the artist is done and they step back and get affected by it. During the making of a piece of art have you been affected in any certain way, or have you found yourself losing all track of time?
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BW: Oh Yeah. I mean when you’re on, you’re on, you don’t even know you are there. And who makes it, who knows and what happened, who knows…but that’s the great fun of it, it’s totally beyond all the normal considerations. And then you maybe put it away or you see it at sometime later and yeah, it does recall that time or non-time. The process is a different condition, it is a different state; and I think it’s highly addictive. I think that’s one of the major reasons that artists make art is because of the experience that comes in that process. And, I don’t think it’s much different from a great athlete who practices and works and gets in the zone, or a musician or; to be truthful, I think it can be there for anybody in any activity. I think maybe it’s easier to have that experience in art, but it’s certainly not exclusive.
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PB: Right, right, I think you’re onto something there; especially of an athlete being in the zone, to a certain extent the athlete starts off and maybe their heart rate is different once they’re in the zone and then once they’re in the zone, all kinds of other things happen.
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BW: Yeah, yeah, everything settles down, everything is still, they don’t know they’re playing the game but they’re playing the perfect game. And the poet describes it and you look around and it gets described all the time, throughout history it’s been described.

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A view inside The Sky Factory, Fairfield, Iowa.
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PB: Now, when you look back on your art education and being influenced by artists, I know it’s sometimes hard for an individual to point out one artist that really hit them between the eyes and really affected them, but can you cite one person?

BW: Well, first of all, I never thought about art or being an artist until after I graduated from college and I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here’, and I went somewhere and it was a presentation, I can’t remember, it was slides by an artist or something back in the old days. And afterwards, I looked at everything and I said yeah, cool, I like it. Then I heard people raving about his vision and I thought to myself, what, I don’t understand, what’s the big deal, that’s how I see, I mean I’ve seen the world like that my whole life. And this was nature, it was slides of nature and I thought to myself, well maybe that’s it, that’s when I had the first thought that maybe you should think about art. So, I called up 3 or 4 older successful artists in Portland, Oregon which is where I was at the time, and asked if I could visit with them for a few minutes and I interviewed these artists to see what it was like to be an artist and after that was over I thought, boy there is nothing unique here, I mean I don’t see anything strange. So then I thought, well I’ll try and do some artwork. I took a couple of night classes, one was watercolor and one was drawing and the teacher in the drawing class said to me, Bill, you know, I just want to alert you, I hope you’re not thinking of pursuing a career as an artist because you really don’t have any talent; you can’t draw. And I said yeah, okay. And then in the watercolor class, the teacher said, man, you really know how to make watercolors. Well I didn’t know that I knew how to make watercolors but he saw something and the other teacher saw nothing. Anyway, the truth is, I have no skill in draftsmanship and drawing, that guy was right. But, it didn’t mean that I didn’t have some artistic orientation; something was appropriate. And, so I went on and continued and just studied watercolors. I painted constantly and I focused on that whenever I could, I went through an art school program at the Museum Art Schools, and then, I can’t remember, I guess I finished that, I don’t know, I don’t remember, and then I went to Amsterdam and I studied there and then once I was done with that, I went back and started painting. To do that, I went out to the desert in Eastern Oregon by myself, with materials, got dumped out there, no vehicle, couldn’t move, 90 miles from the nearest person and I just painted. I painted every day, day after day after day after day after day, and I did that for 6 months and then somebody came and got me. It was fun, you know, I loved it, if winter hadn’t come, I would have stayed, I could have stayed. But anyhow, somewhere in there I just thought, I’m just going to paint sky, I don’t know why, I just did. Sky is what interested me, always had as a child and I just thought, do one thing. I think I had read something, maybe it was Giacometti who made some decision he was just going to deal with the figure, something…anyway, it made sense to me. But, after that I came back and I started to look in the library and I discovered Turner. So, if there was one artist who I really resonated with, it would be Turner and Turner’s watercolors, and I actually went to London, I went to wherever they are and I got them to bring them out, the originals, and I was able to sit at a big table and leaf through these things one at a time, with a guy on a balcony watching to make sure I didn’t do anything and I leafed through these, Turners’ original watercolors; one at a time. I still remember that and it blew my mind. There was another artist, Carlo Crivelli—he created these mysterious spaces that reinforced my belief that space and geometry is something resonant that can impact human awareness, consciousness. And then I got into traditional things from other parts of the world that are not associated with art so much as with the modification of consciousness.

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This large Sky Factory Luminous SkyCeiling expands the confined space of the radiosurgery suite with an illusion of real sky and trees.

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PB: Now, it does seem like a natural progression, your fascination with the sky and going from painting, hand painting the sky, to The Sky Factory.
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BW: Yeah, I was frustrated by my paintings of the sky, I never felt like I got there; where I wanted it, not really. I never did. There were times when it would be magic and there would be a great outcome but it wasn’t consistent. Then I went to photography. The first sky ceiling that I ever made which convinced me that it could become a business was painted. It was a big huge thing and I made it with watercolor. I made replacement ceiling tiles by stretching handmade paper on wood and made a whole thing and dropped these in and it was all modular and it was like one of today’s SkyCeilings. People liked it. But I knew that I couldn’t consistently perform so that I couldn’t make a business of it. And, at the time that happened, printing technology was not readily available as that would have been 1992 or 1993. But by 2002, large format inkjet printing had just really hit and the quality was there and permanent pigments and on and lamination was there, and that opened the possibility.

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Luminous Virtual Windows in the orthodontic clinic of Dr. Sima Rafati, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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PB: Time and technology finally caught up with you. So, do you have any advice for young artists who are just starting out or young people in general who are just starting out?
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BW: Yeah, one thing—truth—you know, I think the numbers are that there are more artists in St. Louis today than there were in all of Europe in the Renaissance. What does that say? It says it’s highly competitive and difficult to live, unlike some European countries like The Netherlands, for example where if you are a serious artist, you will be able to do your work and live, you may not get rich, okay, and you may not get famous but you will be respected and you will be a part of society and you’ll live. I don’t know if that’s possible here; there’s certainly no guarantee here in North America, in the U.S., maybe Canada’s a little better but not much. Further, the art scene, you know where the money gets spent, is very quixotic and it’s hard to know really, it’s very trendy, what’s there, you know, what’s really going to stick and what’s not. So, it’s not reliable and one can’t easily go there. So my advice, is that if you are a painter for example, or a musician, or a poet, whatever, dancer, it makes no difference, your real nature as an artist underlies the form of expression that you’ve chosen. In other words, okay I’m a dancer, but more fundamentally than being a dancer, I’m an artist, and more fundamentally than being an artist, I’m a person who needs to create, and more fundamentally than that, I have some affinity for the way in which creation occurs. So, if you want to fulfill your destiny, you can fulfill it as a dancer if you’re lucky but you can absolutely still fulfill it by living as a creative person wherever you find yourself. In business, for example, you can build a beautiful business using those laws of nature which you as a dancer understand and know. It could be a business about dancing, it could be a business about toilet paper, it doesn’t matter. The key is that if you really and truly are committed to being a creative person, you can do it anywhere and you better be flexible enough to do it anywhere otherwise, you’re going to be either frustrated, or you’re going to have to sell out. And selling out is never good if you know you’re selling out, it’s not the purpose of your life. If you don’t know you’re selling out, maybe you’re not. But, a creative person can always be creative and so I don’t agree with the notion, go get a job, make some money, and then do your art, I don’t buy that, I think that’s poor advice. I think you do your art but you do it more deeply, you figure out how to do it. I have to say that The Sky Factory easily could be viewed as the result of a frustrated artist; I mean I was not making it as an artist. I had to live and I had to support a large number of people, so I had no choice. But, I didn’t mind because I felt that a business, could be treated like a painting, you’re just using different things. Instead of color, starting on clean stretched paper, you start with nothing more than an idea and then you’re moving energy, you’re moving money, you’re moving people, you’re moving things, bringing it all together, seeing how everything interacts to create a living whole; all that, it’s just the same thing as making a painting. I remember how much I loved the way a heavy coarse pigment like cobalt violet mixed with ultra fine viridian and then separated when applied on paper with the right amount of moisture – stunning things would happen. Well, It’s no different to observe someone in the company become finely tuned and expert, enjoying what they are doing, their part of a bigger whole - and the result there too is beautiful.
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PAINTER’S BREAD: It’s an art-form in itself.

BILL WITHERSPOON: Yes.
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These stacks of art books are provided to the employees of The Sky Factory as a part of employee development to expand their knowledge of art.
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More of the products at The Sky Factory can be seen at their website, theskyfactory.com.

A sample of Bill Witherspoon’s art can be seen at artheals.org.